On the 6th of April 2022, the EU-HYBNET consortium held its 2nd Annual Workshop #AW in hybrid format (Rome in person and on-line). The EU-HYBNET Annual Workshop presented the project findings and progress to the project consortium members and pan-European stakeholders; made up of practitioners, industry, academia and NGOs.

The Annual Workshop, hosted by UCSC and co-organized with LAUREA, included three high-level keynote speeches, the project’s results and network activities from the second project year. Additionally, the workshop hosted a handful of presenters and European projects introducing their unique innovation ideas to counter hybrid threats.

Mr. Giannis Skiadaresis, Policy office at DG HOME, gave the first keynote speech and highlighted the “Role of Research and Innovation in responding to hybrid threats”, while the second keynote speaker, Mr. Gregory Mounier from the Innovation Lab of EUROPOL presented the “the Innovations to foster pan-European Security Practitioners’ response to hybrid threats”. Finally an emphasis was made on “Hybrid threats and critical infrastructure protection” by Mr. Rasmus Hindren Head of International Relations at Hybrid CoE in the last Keynote presentation.

During the Annual Workshop, EU-HYBNET’s results from the first project year were underlined by our partners:
– Hybrid CoE took the floor to present the pan-European gaps and needs to counter Hybrid threats,
– SATWAYS and TNO explained to the audience the several innovations to counter hybrid threats and
– KEMEA highlighted the innovation uptake and standardisation activities.

The workshop also included the presentation of Pitches about innovation ideas to counter hybrid threats:
1- Resilience Methodological Framework for Cascading Cyber-physical Threats on Multiple Critical Infrastructure Modes, Mr. Lorcan Connolly/ Research Driven Solutions Limited
2- HENSOLDT Analytics OSINT System, Ms. Victoria Toriser/ Hensoldt
3- Resilience Tool incl. Risk Radar, Dr Somik Chakravarty/ European Risk & Resilience Institute
4- Smart Navigator, Mr. Hasan Suzen/ HybridCore
5- NORDLAB Concept, Prof. Odd-Jarl Borch/ NORD University
6- Defalsif-AI Forensics Platform, Mr. Martin Boyer/ Austrian Institute of Technology GMBH
7- Disinformation Data Space, Mr. Daniel Fritz/ European External Action Service, Strategic Communication division

The day ended with presentations of EU-HYBNET network activities and innovations from other projects: ALIGNER, 7SHIELDS, PRECINCT and MEDEA.

The 2nd EU-HYBNET Annual Workshop was a successful event and provided fruitful exchange between the audience, the consortium and the keynote speakers. A specific highlight of the event was the possibility to engage in-person hence valuable interaction during brakes and joint dinners.

If you are interested in joining EU-HYBNET’s network, you can read the associated information and apply on the project’s website.

For further information on the EU-HYBNET, you can follow the project through Twitter and LinkedIn.